Over the next decade, integration of sensor networks will provide a wide variety of real-time data to improve various aspects of business activity and public life-from highway maintenance to healthcare delivery, from energy peaks to emergency services, and from intermodal freight to intelligent transit. Companies that access and leverage these emerging systems and communities early could realize not only a step improvement in supply chain visibility but also enhanced profiles of their mobile customer base.

To improve supply chain resiliency, companies need to include risk considerations in their supply chain network design efforts, sales and operations planning, and inventory planning; on the execution side, they need to improve logistics and transportation management, secure alternative supply chain partners, and ensure proactive alerting process and response management for disruptions.

Multi-enterprise supply chain management solutions are successful when companies are able to achieve large-scale, global adoption with their trading partners, overcoming both technical and business change management challenges. Software as a service solutions play an important role in enabling multi-enterprise business networks.

Retailers are making a fundamental shift in the way they do business by creating value networks that coordinate processes and technology to understand, shape and respond more efficiently to consumer demand. Leading supply chain organizations recognize the link between responsive networks and improved supply chain performance.

Because of margin and market growth pressures, life sciences supply chains are more dynamic than ever before. In 2009, best practice companies will continue to put in place data analysis processes and "human knowledge" collection procedures to spot red flags and safety risks in their end-to-end supply chains.

The instability of the international container shipping sector, capacity withdrawal on some routes and "slow steaming" practices will expose exporters and importers to greater risks.

Using a global inventory approach to "fire your inventory" may be much less disruptive than other cost-savings options your company may be considering.

Working capital optimization has always been the least expensive and most readily available form of cash. With tightening credit markets the option of liberating cash from a company's operational processes has moved to the forefront. Inventory optimization presents the second-largest opportunity among the working capital components after trade receivables and ahead of trade payables.